Tomb of Jesus Christ: the amazing revelations of the scientists who opened the Holy Sepulcher

Mortar samples from the Holy Sepulcher were badyzed by two different laboratories to determine their age. The result is that the materials used in the construction of which for Christianity is the most sacred place on the planet date back to the Roman era. this would be proof of continuity in the site where the remains of Jesus would have been deposited after his deathdespite the many attacks and disasters to which this place has been subjected.

When was the Holy Sepulcher located?

After being a clandestine religion and having fought for many years, Christianity became an official creed of the Roman Empire when, in 313 Emperor Constantine authorized the practice of this faith.

Constantine himself had converted to Christianity. This was due in large part to the influence of his mother, Elena. It is she who made the pilgrimage to the Holy Land in search of the traces of Jesus.

The mother of Constantine, today St. Helena for the Catholic Church, He traveled with a group of workers who excavated Mount Calvario. From there, he says, he returned with fragments of the cross and other relics related to Jesus.

Saint Helena is also credited with the site of the tomb of Jesus on which the Romans had built a pagan temple, that Constantine had to demolish to build the church of the Holy Sepulcher.

Although archaeologists consider that it is currently impossible to argue convincingly that in the revered site today was the ephemeral tomb of Christ, they can claim that the present church and the Holy Sepulcher are in the same place, fixed in the fourth century by St. Helena and Constantine.

This is the result of restoration work done in a very recent period.

When St. Helena and his entourage arrived in Jerusalem around the year 325, their investigations led them to a Roman temple – pagano – built about 200 years before. This temple was demolished and below, a tomb carved in a limestone cave was found. To expose the interior of the tomb, in which the body of Jesus had been placed on a sepulchral bed, a platform dug in stone, the upper part of the cave was carved. To preserve it, the edict was built, a kind of temple that surrounds the grave.

It is here that the mortar samples were collected to date the materials.

It was possible because recently the six Christian orders guarding the Holy Sepulcher (Greek Orthodox Church, Roman Catholic, Armenian Apostolic and Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch, Coptic and Ethiopian) endorsed a team from the National Technical University of Athens will perform an inspection and a restoration from the edict, the structure that covers the grave.

For the first time in history, the Holy Sepulcher was inaugurated …

The findings of this team of experts were revealed by the National Geographic Society, which participated in the project "Conservation Interventions, Reinforcement and Repair for the Rehabilitation of the Holy Aedicule" of the Church of the Resurrection from Jerusalem. This work was supervised by the interdisciplinary team of the National Technical University of Athens for the Protection of Monuments, led by Professor Antonia Moropoulou.

Thus, and for the first time in centuries, it was possible to appreciate the interior of the tomb, that is to say, the original surface of what would have been the tomb of Jesus.

"We removed the marble cover from the grave and were surprised by the amount of infill material underneath," he explained. Fredrik Hiebert, archaeologist of the National Geographic Society, during the opening of the tomb. "The scientific badysis will be long, but ultimately we can see the original rocky surface on which, according to tradition, lay the body of Christ ", he added.

The marble cover that sealed the tomb dates from at least the middle of the 16th century, but the first studies carried out in the internal materials show that they date from the time of Constantine, that is to say from the fourth century.

This implies that the sacred site, at least one that St. Helena and her son, according to the indications of the oral tradition of the region, had recognized as the location of the empty tomb of Jesus Christ, It is the same as Catholic worshipers worship today and keep the church in Jerusalem. Let us remember that for the Christian tradition, the body of Jesus remained only three days there, because it has been resurrected since.

What has most impressed archaeologists, is that Despite many avatars that the region has traveled, the site visited and worshiped by thousands of faithful around the world is the same one that Santa Elena went through for his pilgrimage. there are nearly 17 centuries and on which his son ordered the construction of a church, which then had to be rebuilt several times.

The scientific badessments carried out in 2017 confirm that the remains of the limestone cave located inside the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem are those of the tomb located between the years 325 and 326 by the Romans. The dating of the mixture used in its construction is about 345 years, according to the National Geographic Society.

According to the New Testament, Jesus was crucified between the 30s and 33s on Mount Golgotha. The fate of the crucified was the common grave. But Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy merchant disciple of Jesus, obtained permission from the Roman authorities to bury him. The entrance to the tomb was sealed with a large round stone. Three days later, when a group of followers of Jesus, including Mary Magdalene, approached the tomb, found it open and empty.